Tag Archives: guitar practice method

F Blues Guitar Survival Kit – What You Need To Know

F blues is something you can get started with quite easily. You only need a few different things:The Chords, the Scales and the Arpeggios. I cover all of this and also have a transcribed solo using this material so you can get started both comping and soloing on an F Jazz Blues.

The 12 bar Blues is a key component when it comes to jazz chord progressions and F is for jazz blues probably the most common key. Billie’s Bounce, Straight No Chaser and Au Privave are all blues songs in the key of F.

The 4 Chorus Lesson

In this lesson I have made 4 choruses of exercises: The chords, the arpeggios that go with the chords. The scales that fits with the chords and arpeggios and finally a solo chorus which demonstrates how you might use the other exercises when playing over the F blues.

To keep it simple I have kept all exercises in one position so that if you go through the exercises you should begin to have a tool set to improvise over the Bb blues in that position.

The chord voicings

To improvise over a song you probably need to be able to play the chords so you can hear the harmony and how it moves. In the following example I have written out a set of voicings to play the F Blues.

The voicings can also be played from these diagrams:

You’ll notice that I in general don’t write out which extensions I use, so I write out the basic type of chord and if whoever is playing a chord he can fill in extensions to his own taste. This is common practice in Jazz in general.

The F Blues Arpeggios

When playing over changing harmony the best way to really follow the chords is of course to use the notes of the chords in your solo. Therefore it is very important to be able to play the chords of the progression as arpeggios. In example 3 I have written out the arpeggios in this position.

To make it easier to connect the different arpeggios I have written them out in a similar range which means that I don’t always start on the root of each chord.

You should practice the arpeggios like I’ve written them out, but you would get a lot from also improvising over the progression just using the arpeggios.

The Scales for the chords

In the 2nd example I added a scale to each chord. The way I am playing the scales is that I start on the root and run up to the 7th, this gives you a bit of time to switch to the next chord. This way of applying scales to a progression is the same as you’ll find in Barry Harris exercises. It is a nice way to add the scale in a musical way so that you hear how they spell out the harmony.

The F7,Bb7, Gm7 and C7 are easily understood in terms of where they sit in the key, since they are all mixolydian or dorian scales.

The B dim scale is in fact an C harmonic minor from B to Bb. You can see how I arrive by this by looking at it from the Bb7 scale:

Bb C D Eb F G Ab Bb

If I need to fit an B dim in there then an easy way to do that is to replace the Bb with a B.

B C D Eb F G Ab  which you can write out from F to recognize that it as an C harmonic minor scale.

For the D7(b9) you need to look at it as a dominant resolving to Gm7, which tells us that we should use a Gm scale for it. In this context the (actually in most contexts) that means using the G harmonic minor scale. You can use this approach to determine what scale you should use for any auxiliary dominant.

The F Blues Solo

As an example of how you can use the material I have written out a short improvised solo on a F blues.

I hope you can use the exercises and the materials to get started improvising over a Jazz Blues progression. You can check out some of my other lessons on Blues, arpeggios and target notes for more ideas.

Take you Blues Playing up a level with this collection

Jazz Blues Solo Intro Pack

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Music Theory Is The Effective Way For You To Learn Faster

If you know you basic Music Theory well then you can easily start to add another level to how you analyze melodies and chord progressions which will help you work more focused and learn faster when you practice. 

This video will discuss some of the things that you use Music Theory for that will help you learn more efficient and process much more information!

List of contents:

0:00 Intro 

0:17 What to use Music Theory for as a jazz musician 

0:55 Some basic things you need to know to use this 

1:28 Learning Songs and Melodies — The Riddle 

2:09 Understanding a melody thinking in phrases and memorizing it 

3:05 The basic advantages for this approach 

3:25 Learning Phrases and Licks —

3:45 Example Lick 1 

4:04 How to analyze it 

4:37 Analyzing and Chunking Lick no 1 

6:15 Using this to reduce the line to simple blocks we can remember 

6:43 Writing better licks using the music theory

7:47 Example Lick 2 

7:53 The Analsis of Lick 2 

8:26 Understanding how the lick is built and conncected 

9:00 Example Lick 3 

9:05 Simple but interesting rhythms 

9:36 Putting Rhythm and Melodic ideas together. 

10:02 The building blocks of the lick 

10:30 Check out the comments and share your experience 

11:30 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

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Are You Wasting Valuable Time Practicing Jazz Licks Like This?

We all study jazz licks to add new ideas and techniques to our improvisations and our vocabulary. But I often get told by students how they choose a very in effective way of studying licks and are in fact really just wasting their time. In this video I will outline what is not useful when studying licks and also what is a better approach if you want to add material to your repertoire.

I will also use a part of a Grant Green solo as an example of how he gets it right and uses it in his solo.

Practicing Jazz Licks – Contents

0:00 Intro – Learn licks and increase our vocabulary

0:53 The bad way to practice licks even though they are good examples

1:25 Playing some licks (from paper with a metronome?)

1:51 Play the licks over a song

2:22 What is wrong with this approach

2:27 Too Much Information

2:49 A more focused approach to learn from licks

3:10 A II V I lick is about the same as learning a Jazz Standard by heart.

3:35 Why Complete Licks don’t work well in solos

4:03 Converting licks to useful and flexible building blocks

4:33 A lick from the Grant Green Solo on I’ll Remember April and how he uses it

5:21 Finding a better Chunk size

5:39 Making lines with the Grant Green Phrase

6:01 Using the same idea on other chords

6:27 Other examples of how great players use licks.

7:18 How do you work with licks? Do you avoid them? Leave a comment!

7:35 Barry Harris story on learning from Charlie Parker

8:11 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

Claus Levin Guest Lesson and collaboration

A few weeks ago I was talking to Claus Levin. We decided to work together on some guest lessons for each others channel.

I think it is a great way to meet other YouTube guitarists by having them do a guest lesson and get a small introduction. 

Claus Levin – The Core Of Improvisation!

The videos Claus Levin makes are mostly focused on the psychological and technical aspects of learning the instrument and with some useful insights and philosophies there is a lot to learn from his videos. 

His lesson on my channel is also taking a step back and then looking at what it actually is to improvise. 

You can check out the Claus Levin YouTube channel here: Claus Levin

The videos

 

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Get the 3 Notes Per String Pentatonics PDF!

My lesson on the Claus Levin channel is on using 3 notes per string pentatonics and the PDF that you can download via that is available here:  3 NPS Pentatonic scales